


After Farewell: A Gojira 1954 Fanfiction

by OsheenNevoy



Category: Gojira | Godzilla (1954)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-30
Updated: 2019-06-10
Packaged: 2020-03-29 17:44:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 21,519
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19024825
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OsheenNevoy/pseuds/OsheenNevoy
Summary: Despite his best efforts, Dr. Serizawa Daisuke fails to die in the destruction of Gojira.  Can he now find some way to build a new life for himself?  Or does he still have no choice but to take his own life, to protect humanity from the threat of the Oxygen Destroyer?





	1. Chapter One: The Destroyer

**Author's Note:**

> Last fall, for the first time, I watched the original Japanese classic "Gojira" (1954). As so many have been before me, I was astonished to discover how different this film is from the breezy and cheesy later Toho monsters films that I remember fondly from my youth. "Gojira" amazed and enthralled me with its stark anti-war message, the power of its imagery and the actors' performances, and the striking connections between Gojira's rampages and the all-too-real destruction which was caused by the Second World War. 
> 
> I began to read up on the making of the original "Gojira," as well as on the closing months of the war in Japan--most specifically, the horrific fire-bombings that devastated Tokyo and so many other Japanese cities and towns in 1945. Realizing that everyone involved in making "Gojira" had lived through the war and its aftermath, I decided I wanted to further explore these issues in the context of a sequel to "Gojira."
> 
> I encourage anyone who hasn't already done so to watch the original film. Hopefully needless to say, this story of mine, as a sequel to "Gojira," has no connection to the 1956 re-cut American version released as "Godzilla, King of the Monsters." For instance, the Dr. Serizawa in this tale has no "old college friend" from America, a reporter by the now rather amusing name of Steve Martin.
> 
> Dr. Serizawa and his fellow characters from "Gojira" are the property of Toho Studios. I'm not making any profit from this--apart from the satisfaction of being able to tell a story I want to tell.

**After Farewell**

**A _Gojira_ 1954 Fanfiction**

_This exhilaration, this jubilation! We have won! We can see that Gojira will never rise from the ocean’s depths again! This victory could not have been achieved if it were not for the young scientist, Dr. Serizawa._

—Reporter’s voice-over during the closing moments of _Gojira_ , 1954

**Chapter One: The Destroyer**

I was not happy to die.

I imagine that few of the young men our government sacrificed in the war were happy, either, in the final seconds before they rammed their planes into the Americans’ battleships and bombers.

I don’t know what those youths felt. I think, however, it was not happiness, despite what the propaganda told us—and despite what some of the pilots wrote in their farewell poems.

As for me: as I stood on the ocean floor and I opened the capsule containing my Oxygen Destroyer, what I felt was not happiness.

Instead, I felt peace.

I knew I finally had the answer I sought. I had the best answer I could find.

At last I would end the terror that haunted me since the day I made my horrible discovery. I would turn that discovery into a force for good. I would make it serve the cause of humanity. In one supreme moment, I would make all of it stop. I would end my discovery, my fear, my guilt. That same moment would end the monster that was ravaging my country—and that threatened all the world.

I watched the bubbles rise from the capsule, spreading the element that would destroy every life it reached. I saw fish flitting around me, as if I were standing in some gigantic version of my aquariums back home. It gave me a pang of regret to see those fish, so happily ignorant of their approaching doom.

Beyond the bubbles, beyond the fish, beyond the towering pillars of rock that surrounded me—I saw the dark, enormous shape of Gojira.

Two nights ago, this animal devastated Tokyo. Gojira was walking now, slowly, in a serene sort of calm. I could not hear the thundering tread of its footfalls. Somehow, I did not even feel them.

The thought came to me that down here, Gojira no longer seemed like a monster. As I watched the stately pacing of that mighty figure, it did not seem the incomprehensible horror it became on land.

Here, Gojira seemed right. Here, it belonged.

Foolishly, I thought, _I ought to have written a poem before I left home yesterday._

_Stupid,_ I told myself. _Your actions will stand on their own without a poem to speak for them._

Down the telephone line into my diving helmet journeyed a voice from the world above. The voice of Ogata Hideto yelled my name.

“Serizawa!” Ogata shouted. “Serizawa!”

I pictured him on the deck of the ship, with crewmembers, reporters and scientists clustered about him. Beside him I pictured Professor Yamane, the man who for these nearly ten years past had been a father to me.

And I thought, _Emiko will be next to him. She will be right there beside Ogata; she will be leaning over the intercom with him. Whatever I say to him, Emiko will hear, too._  

I saw the bubbles spreading. The water was churning now like the contents of a pot on the boil. And that animal twice the height of a skyscraper started to feel what was happening. Gojira jerked back and upward. I saw it raise its arms up high—just the way a human would do when trying to surrender.

“What’s going on?” came Ogata’s frantic voice. “Serizawa!”

I heard elation in my voice as I answered him. “Ogata! It worked!” I took a deep breath and I thought of Emiko there at his side.

“Both of you,” I said, “be happy. Farewell … Farewell.”

_It is not a poem,_ I thought, _but it will have to do._

My hands were steady as I took out my diver’s knife. I sawed the knife through my lifeline: the rope that tethered me to the ship, and the telephone line along with it. Just before the line was cut, I heard Ogata shouting, “Serizawa! Hey, bring him up!”

In the abrupt silence when that connection was severed, I sliced through the rubber oxygen hose. Like the boy in that story about plugging leaks in Holland’s dykes, I jammed one gloved thumb into the severed hose. I wasn’t sure how long I could live on the oxygen still in the helmet, but keeping water out of the tube would buy me some seconds, at least.

It wasn’t that I had any thought of surviving. I simply wanted to see all I could of the Oxygen Destroyer’s effects, for as long as I could. I suppose a true scientist will always be curious, even when he knows he will die before he can write his observations down.

I wondered if I would lose consciousness from my own lack of oxygen, before the Oxygen Destroyer disintegrated me along with Gojira and every other organism in its reach.

Then suddenly I thought I saw a different way that I would die.

Gojira fell. It fell toward me. There was nowhere I could go to get out of its way; I was already backed up against a pillar of rock.

I had made up my mind to die in the monster’s fall—metaphorically speaking. I suppose it would have been fitting if Gojira actually fell on top of me.

It did not happen in that way. Not quite.

I saw the animal flail, lunge, twist itself about. In one astonishing moment, its head the size of a small bus raced past me, mere meters from where I stood against the rock. For perhaps the space of a heartbeat, Gojira and I were literally eye-to-eye.

Its head was turned sidelong to me, so I only saw the one eye, an eye nearly as large as my entire body. And I, of course, have only had one eye, since the night of March 9, 1945.

Then the eye and the vast darkness swept past and surged upward, toward the world of light and air.

I suppose what hit me was a massive wave—set off by Gojira’s writhing, or by the Oxygen Destroyer, or by both. I don’t think any part of Gojira actually struck me, not even just the tip of its tail. If it had, I think it is extremely unlikely that I would have survived. But something hit me. It washed me away from the rocks where I had been huddling and sent me tumbling helplessly like a flower petal riding a tsunami’s waves.

Logically, I know I should not trust in the reality of my thoughts and sensations in those moments. Oxygen depletion, disorientation, shock: all of them combine to tell me that my impressions should scarcely be relied upon. And yet subsequent events have shown that perhaps what I sensed was accurate, after all.

I did not believe that the feelings and thoughts I experienced then were mine. They seemed too vast, as if they were linked to a body incomprehensibly larger than my own.

I felt searing agony that seemed to pound through my skull, burn my skin, ripple through me in unceasing waves. And I sensed a thought—not a thought in words such as human beings use them, but still a thought which I felt certain I understood.

It was a question—all-encompassing, despairing. Just one single question, demanded in uncomprehending anguish:

_Why?_

* * *

 

What I saw when my eye opened again was a bright circle of sky-blue, surrounded by darkness. I blinked repeatedly, trying to make sense of what I was seeing.

With my eye focused to the proper distance, I saw a jagged pattern of lines marring the blue. I thought I could see water droplets amid the lines. In one long, thin triangle of space, the blue seemed brighter, without any lines or water to dull its impact.

_It’s the vision port at the front of my diving helmet,_ I thought. _I’m seeing through the front port, and I’m looking up at the sky. And the glass of the port must be broken._

Of course it was broken, I realized a moment later. From up above me, in the direction of that blue circle, I could feel the whispering touch of fresh air.

Discovering that the glass had broken so near to my face sent a jolt of fear through me. Immediately I forced my fear back down.

I could feel no indication that the breaking glass had injured me. And the only aspect of my face that truly matters to me is my one surviving eye. There was certainly no sign that my eye had been damaged by the glass.

The circle didn’t move, so I must not be moving, either. When I thought about it, it seemed I could feel some solid surface beneath me.

I decided I was experiencing reality, not a hallucination or dream. The underlying ache of my body seemed uncompromisingly real. So did the harsher, raw-feeling ache in my throat and my chest.

A dark shape suddenly blocked out the circle of blue. I gasped at the unexpected change. My gasp set off a series of rasping coughs.

“Easy, son. Easy,” growled a rough, human voice. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

_Calm down,_ I ordered myself. _It’s only a person leaning over you. His head just blocked out the sky._

When my coughing stopped, I choked out a one-word question. “Gojira?”

“They tell us this one is dead,” said the voice. “They say the scientist killed it, and the scientist killed himself.” The voice was that of an old man. It grated like metal scraping over stone.

_The scientist killed it,_ I thought. _The scientist, meaning me._

I managed to ask the old man, “Where am I?”

He answered, “Odo Island.”

_Odo Island. Of course._

It made sense, I supposed; as much sense as any of this made. Our expedition had located Gojira in Odo Island’s fishing waters. This seemed to be, in some sense, the animal’s home territory; perhaps this was where it had its den, or one of its dens. “Gojira” was the Odo Islanders’ name for the sea monster of their ancient legends. This island had been the first place we knew of where the massive being made an attack on land.

_But how can I be alive?_ my thoughts wailed. _How can this be possible?_

I began to cry—silently, I hope. I felt the tears creep along my cheek.

I supposed I had been within the Oxygen Destroyer’s range for only a brief period of time. It must have been two minutes at the absolute most before the wave knocked me away, no matter how much longer it had felt.

It took a very great deal less than two minutes for the Destroyer to act on the aquarium-dwelling fish in my lab at home. But perhaps the Destroyer’s element entered their bodies through their gills. Since I had been breathing the air pumped down to me from the ship, it meant the element did not get the chance to enter my lungs and disintegrate me from inside.

That much, I could accept. But that I had survived asphyxiation for long enough … and that in being hurled through the ocean, my thumb hadn’t slipped free of the severed air hose, sending water into my helmet to drown me …

And that, of all unlikely fates, the wave should have happened to propel me onto the single piece of land for ten kilometers around …

_This is wrong,_ cried my thoughts. _It’s so wrong. It’s so wrong for me to be alive!_

_Brace up, Daisuke,_ I told myself. _You have got to pull yourself together._

I had to take action before my fate was removed from my hands.

I believe my crying stopped at around that time. I tried to lift my head, and utterly failed at it. Moving my body, for the moment, seemed equally beyond my capacity. My panic was painfully clear in my voice as I asked, “Does anyone else know I’m here?”

“I doubt it,” answered the old man. “Not yet. My house is just up on the hill there; that’s why I’m the one who saw you.”

“No one can know!” I cried desperately. “Please! No one can know I’m alive! Will you help me?” I raced on, while my discoverer doubtless decided I had gone out of my mind. “Hide me! Please! I’m begging you! Don’t let anyone know about me!”

The old man, to my heart-wrenching gratitude, voiced no observation on the topic of how insane I was sounding. He only made the matter-of-fact statement, “I don’t think you can get off the ground, wearing that suit. I know I can’t carry you in it.”

“No,” I said. “That’s true. I’ve got to get out of it. I think—I think we’ll need a wrench to unbolt the helmet.”

“I’ll go get one from my house,” growled the man whom I was rapidly coming to think of as my savior.

He took about five minutes to go to his house and return with the wrench. It took quite a bit longer than that to go through the multitudinous steps of getting me out of the diving suit. If I had been in any state of mind to feel amusement, I probably would have been amused at the contrast between my getting into that suit, and my getting out of it.

Donning the diving suit had been a thoroughly business-like process. There on the deck of the ship I had been almost as passive as a doll, moving around as I was told while two well-trained crewmembers efficiently went about their task of suiting me up.

I was even more passive now, but the old man of Odo Island was a very great deal less efficient. He puttered about me, muttering more-or-less under his breath. In increasing ill-humor he unbolted the helmet and breastplate and unhooked the various straps. When he finally dragged the helmet off my head, the old man took a break to catch his breath.

For my part, I had been doing nothing _but_ taking a break. But now I was striving to catch my breath as well, at the overwhelming sensation of my head being surrounded by fresh air.

It seemed an insanely difficult task to turn my head and look at my rescuer. There he squatted on the sand beside me, a living embodiment of old-time Japan. He wore nothing but an old-fashioned loincloth, happi jacket and straw-rope sandals. He had close-cropped white hair and a gray-stubbled chin, and his skin was the sun-baked brown of every old fisherman’s.

As for his face, it seemed a perfect match for his voice. It looked hard, craggy and weather-beaten, like a cliff overlooking the sea.

We were on a beach, but I supposed that much had already been obvious, since I’d been flung here out of the ocean. Behind the old man I could see the bushes and low trees of a scrubby hillside.

I whispered to the old man, “Thank you.”

He gave an unimpressed-sounding snort—though I will point out here that, as I came to know him, I learned his voice nearly always sounds unimpressed. He said, “There’s still a lot to do to get you out of that suit. You can thank me when I’ve got it done.”

Back to work he went on the suit’s numerous elements, making his crouching way around me like a methodical and bad-tempered crab. Off came the breastplate and the attached weight. Off, finally, came the ludicrously heavy belt. When he’d pulled the belt free, he sat back on his heels and asked me, “Think you can wriggle out of it now?”

“No,” I had to answer, thinking back to all the steps the crewmembers had gone through. “The shoes need to be unstrapped and unlaced. And the backs of the legs lace up, too.”

“Damn it,” muttered the old man.

After some further minutes’ work, my rescuer declared, “I can’t see anything more to undo. See if you can get out now.”

He held the massive suit in place while I inched painfully out of it. Free at last, and worn out by the effort, I lay in the spot to which I had wormed myself. I let my head flop onto its left side. Against my face, the sand was like a warm pillow.

I shivered in the breeze. Thanks to my sweat, my shirt and trousers felt entirely adhered to my body.

One element of the diving suit was still on: the gloves. Although my hands were badly shaking, I succeeded in pulling the gloves off. Then I reached my right hand to my head. The bandana I’d used as a headband to hold back my hair was still there. So, to my intense relief, was my eyepatch.

_How unbelievable is that?_ I asked myself. _Who would believe I can be hurled who-knows-how-far through the ocean, and I can still wind up here with bandana and eyepatch both neatly in place?_

Once again, if I’d been in any mindset to laugh, I probably would have done so. But this was no time for laughing. I also did not have the time to continue lying around.

With fresh force, my fear came back that someone else would come along and find me. “No can know I’m alive,” I insisted feverishly. “I have to hide. I have to. I can’t let anybody else see me.”

I forced myself to sit up. Unsurprisingly, my head seemed to be whirling as badly as if I was on shipboard, and seasick. I made a feeble gesture toward the discarded diving suit and helmet. “I’ve got to hide that, too.”

The old fisherman was still crouching near me. He also still looked unimpressed.

After a glance around, he jerked one thumb over his shoulder. “Those bushes should do to hide the stuff in, for now.”

The old man made a try at picking up the helmet. Then he snorted and decided to roll it along the beach, instead.

I thought I shouldn’t allow him to keep on doing all the work. More-or-less crawling, I made my way over to the diving suit, lying before me like some dead and desiccated sea creature.

I took hold of it by the shoulders and started trying to haul it up the beach. That attempt immediately ended. My shaking hands lost their grip. I overbalanced and fell over, just able to stop myself from smacking my face into the sand.

I heard another snort from my rescuer. “You keep on resting up, there, sonny,” he called back to me. “I’ll get all of that hidden in due course.”

I was at least able to push myself up again until I reached a respectable kneeling position. Praying that I wasn’t about to complete my humiliation by vomiting, I gazed out at the sea.

Dark and shining and vast, the water seemed to be taunting me. The distant rolling waves, and their tiny offspring that played nearby against the sand, all seemed in my mind to be mocking me. The ocean, I felt, was mocking my failure to die.

I thought, _I need to finish what I started._

_I_ _t should be so simple. I should be able to walk out there, just keep on walking, and end it all._

_I_ could _walk out there, if only I could walk!_

Of course, crawling into the ocean would achieve the same effect. But I knew it was pointless for me to even try.

As weak and useless as my body was now, the old man could halt my suicide attempt with scarcely any effort. With humiliating clarity, I imagined myself starting to crawl toward the waves—and I imagined him dragging me up the beach, grunting something like, “Hold your horses, sonny; no suicide for you today.”

Shivering, hating my failure, desperately promising myself that I would neither vomit nor cry, I knelt there until the old fellow got all my diving gear stashed in the bushes. Then he walked over to me and offered, “All right, then, kid. You want to hide out in my house?”

Of course, I had to let him help me to my feet. I’m not sure that what I did on our way up that hill can even be classified as walking. He didn’t quite have to drag me along as a dead weight, but I know my contribution to that process was relatively laughable.

To gain at least some camouflage for my mortifying embarrassment, I decided to talk.

“You said I could thank you when you got the suit off me,” I said—with some effort, for our struggle up the hill had winded me almost before it started. “I thank you. May I ask your name?” As soon as I said that, I regretted it, since I had no intention of telling him my name in return.

The old man rumbled, “Izuma Kenichirou.”

_Of course,_ I thought. Professor Yamane had told me about him. Mr. Izuma was the one who first mentioned the name and legend of Gojira to Hagiwara the reporter.

“Yes,” I said, “you’re the Odo Island village elder.”

He answered with one of his snorts. “I say I’m a village elder,” he said. “All the younger people say I’m an old fool who doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”

We straggled a little way further along the path up his hill, before Izuma asked me, “I suppose you’re not going to tell me your name?”

I made no reply to that. Sounding cheerfully smug at having been proved right, old Izuma declared, “I thought not.”

I had no intention of speaking my name to him, but I knew such caution on my part was almost certainly pointless. Even if Izuma did not know my name, there was every likelihood the clear-sighted codger understood precisely who I was.

What other diver-in-distress would plausibly get tossed out of the sea, on this day and at this place, _except_ for the famous scientist who was supposed to have died with Gojira?

Mr. Izuma’s house, when we reached it, was just about what I’d expected it to be: an old-fashioned one-room place in a very good state of repair. My guess is that when Izuma had gotten too old to keep on fishing, he’d turned most of his formidable energy toward the upkeep of his house.

Gasping for breath and shivering, I sat down in the entryway. Further inside the house, Mr. Izuma pulled out his spare futon and quilts. I didn’t have any shoes to take off, having left mine on the deck of the ship. My socks, however, were a mess, caked with sand, dirt and twigs from our climb up the hill. They were so thick with debris that I thought they seemed about ready to walk away on their own. In my thoughts I gloomily joked that my socks could probably walk better now than I could. I peeled off the socks and deposited them next to Mr. Izuma’s sandals.

“So, come on in, then, kid,” called the rough, mocking voice of Izuma. He helped me to my feet and supported me as I walked inside his house. Gratefully I crawled into the bedding he’d provided for me. And then I set about shamefully abusing his hospitality.

I was a terrible houseguest to Mr. Izuma. I regretted my behavior toward him as soon as I returned to a more societally acceptable frame of mind.

For the two days that followed, he brought me water, tea, broth, rice. I refused them all. That first afternoon, that night, the next day, the night that followed, I took nothing to drink or eat. My mind was fixed on one conviction: that my suicide was a task I had to finish. I would finish it, I thought, by just lying there, taking no sustenance until I died.

Just lying there, that is, with an occasional break to answer the increasingly feeble call of nature. Single-minded and desperate though I was, I was not quite so far gone that I was willing to soil the bedding Izuma lent to me.

Why did I think this was the way I should behave? Why did I not allow Izuma to help me regain my strength? When I was recovered enough to properly walk again, I could simply have thanked him, left his home, and promptly hurled myself into the sea.

It seemed that ought to make sense. But I felt certain that if I tried to follow that course, I would never succeed in going through with it.

“Humans are weak animals,” I’d said to Ogata, back home in my basement lab. I was terrified of learning that the weakest animal was myself.

If I let myself live, even to the minimal extent of swallowing some tea and rice, I feared I would never again succeed in making up my mind to die. Would I be able to give it all up a second time?

I wouldn’t. I knew I would not.

I would want to talk with Professor Yamane again. I would want to see Emiko, and to tell her I understood. I would want to be a guest at Emiko and Ogata’s wedding.

I would never be able to keep my survival a secret. I would go back to my life. But in going back, I would be locking myself in the prison cell that was my guilt. I would be embracing my darkest nightmare.

There was no way to conceal the nature of my discovery, now. Emiko, Ogata and I might keep our silence about it, but the evidence was out there: the evidence of who-knows-how-many kilometers of ocean with the oxygen removed from it, and its every life destroyed.

The politicians, the governments: they would learn what my discovery entailed. And the race would be on. Could I resist the wooing that I knew would follow: the promises of funding, endless resources, wherewithal to channel my research into so many projects that would benefit mankind?

Wouldn’t I be trapped by that siren’s song? And while I listened to it, and I fooled myself, they would take my discovery of the Oxygen Destroyer and would build with it the next super-weapon—the next destroyer of worlds.

I’m not claiming I was thinking rationally. If I had been, I would have realized old Izuma would never let me get away with killing myself.

His many efforts to make me eat and drink tend to blend together in my mind. I think I remember one specific instance taking place in the second afternoon. This time, all he’d brought was water. I remember him urging me, “Come on, now, kid. A little water won’t hurt you.”

I think I only answered him by keeping my mouth shut. Sounding increasingly exasperated, Izuma repeated, “Come on! You need it.”

“No, I don’t need it,” I rasped. “I need to die.”

“Yeah?” the old man challenged me. “Why’s that? What’s so important about you dying?”

I had the notion in my head that if I told him my thoughts, he would understand it all and leave me alone. “If I don’t die,” I murmured to him, “maybe the world will die. If I die, I can save it … or keep it alive a bit longer. Please, Mr. Izuma. Please help me. Please let me die. Please let me save the world.”

I heard him mutter, “Idiot.”

He didn’t try to urge me again, after that. I thought perhaps he was going to do as I had asked. But shortly afterward, he left his house. I remember feebly calling after him, “Please, Mr. Izuma. I’m begging you. Let me do this. Don’t tell anyone about me.”

I was afraid that, when he came back, he would bring someone to take me away. But as I drifted through half consciousness and noticed that Izuma had come home, he simply went back into his daily routine. I smelled it when he fixed and ate his dinner—the smell of which was distantly agonizing to me—but he seemed to have given up having anything to do with me. Later, I remember his gruff voice saying through the darkness, “Sleep well, kid.” He sounded serenely unconcerned by how unlikely it was that I would sleep well.

Indeed, I’d slept very little since I had entered his house. For the most part, I just seemed to float, not quite awake nor asleep. I prayed that eventually I would float right out of life itself.

Sunrise came. Soon I began to hear Izuma puttering through his day. To my happiness, he still didn’t bring anything that he wanted me to eat or drink.

Suddenly he dragged my floating mind back to earth. “Hey, there, kid,” Izuma called to me. “Somebody’s here to see you.”

My whole being seemed to jolt. I heard a voice cry out, “Dr. Serizawa!” I squeezed my eye shut, as though I could close out reality as easily as I obscured my view of the house’s far-away rafters.

“Mr. Izuma,” my parched voice protested. “I begged you not to tell anyone about me.”

“Yes,” he said pitilessly, “you begged me. I didn’t make any promise. I’m sorry, son. I don’t want you killing yourself in my house.”

“Dr. Serizawa,” the other voice said, “please, won’t you look at me? It’s Shinkichi.”

I opened my eye and tried to look toward his voice. The blurs in that direction slowly resolved themselves into two figures sitting side-by-side: my unsentimental host, and the sixteen-year-old whom Professor Yamane had more-or-less adopted after Shinkichi lost his family in Gojira’s first land attack, here on Odo Island.

“Shinkichi,” I repeated. “What are you doing here?”

“Mr. Izuma phoned the Yamanes’ house yesterday and asked me to come see him.”

I groaned. “The Yamanes …”

“Please don’t worry!” the boy interjected. “They don’t know about you. Mr. Izuma didn’t even tell me about you until I got here. All the Yamanes know is Mr. Izuma asked me to come help some of the villagers move off-island, since there aren’t any fish in the waters here anymore.”

_No,_ I thought, _I suppose there aren’t. I suppose the Oxygen Destroyer did put at least a temporary end to Odo Island’s position as the base camp for a fishing fleet._

I looked at the two who were watching me. The old man, at that moment, looked to me like a statue carved out of driftwood—and he looked as though he cared as little for what might happen around him as the driftwood statue would have cared. In contrast, the tension-filled youth beside him seemed to radiate worry as he looked at me.

It occurred to me that in the brief time I’d been acquainted with Sieji Shinkichi, I had never seen him smile. Then I reminded myself that in that time there had been no reason for the boy to smile. Shinkichi had almost certainly never seen me smile, either.

I attempted to speak persuasively, despite the dry, cracked sound of my voice. “Shinkichi,” I said, “maybe you can persuade Mr. Izuma. You must understand why I have to die. Ogata and Emiko must have told you something of why I chose to do it.”

He gave a reluctant-looking nod and began, “They said that your invention—”

“My discovery,” I obsessively corrected him.

“Your discovery,” he repeated. “They said your discovery could be turned into a weapon as terrible as the atom bomb. So you destroyed all your notes and you made up your mind to die with Gojira, so the weapon couldn’t be made.”

“Yes,” I whispered. “Yes. You see, now, Mr. Izuma? Now do you understand?”

Shinkichi hastily rubbed the back of one hand over his nose and his eyes. Mr. Izuma waited until the boy had himself under control. Then he grated, “What I see is that there’s almost never only one solution to a problem.”

“Yes,” Shinkichi put in excitedly. “Mr. Izuma and I have an idea. We were talking about it outside. We’ve got an idea for what you can do instead of dying. Please, Dr. Serizawa! Will you let us tell you about it?”

_Humans are weak animals,_ I thought again. I felt an edge of panic. My first impulse was to tell myself I mustn’t listen to them. I couldn’t let myself be tempted. Then I asked myself, _What choice have I got? If they aren’t going to let me starve myself to death, I have to come up with an alternative plan, anyway. So what harm can it do for me to listen?_

“All right,” I murmured. “All right, just … just let me sit up …”

Weak though I was, I felt I should not participate in this conversation lying down. Both of my interlocutors made lunges at me. Shinkichi protested, “No, Dr. Serizawa, you don’t need to sit up,” and old Izuma grumbled, “Honestly, kid. You’ve been trying to starve yourself for days; it’s all right for you to stay horizontal.”

I insisted. Of course, I was not in any state to sit unsupported. Finally, Mr. Izuma got me propped up against a wall, with quilts still bundled around me. Shinkichi suggested hopefully, “Maybe you’ll have a little water to drink, now?”

“No. Tell me your idea, first.”

“Well … what we think is that you don’t really have to die. Just let everyone keep on believing you’re dead. And you go on living, under a new identity. If no one thinks Dr. Serizawa’s alive, they won’t have any reason to search for you, so they’ll never find you and force you to build that weapon.”

I believe I smiled a little, thinking that Shinkichi’s idea probably came out of some novel he had read. I pointed out, “New identities aren’t easy to create. And they cost money. I haven’t got any. I can’t get access to any of my own money, not without revealing that I’m alive.”

Mr. Izuma put in, “He’s not suggesting that you buy an identity from gangsters. Go on, Shinkichi. Tell him the rest of your idea.”

The boy said eagerly, “There’s an identity I can give you. You know that my … that my brother and our aunt were killed here on the island, the first time Gojira came ashore?”

“Yes. The Yamanes told me about it. I am sorry.”

He hurried onward. “Gojira didn’t burn any of the houses here. All that happened to our house was that … I think his tail hit it. So nearly all our belongings were saved from the wreckage.”

He paused for a moment, with a miserable little grimace. I’m sure that Shinkichi, the old man and I were all thinking of the same thing: the tragic irony in the fact that what could not be saved from the wreckage was the lives of his family.

“So you see,” Shinkichi continued, “I’ve got my brother’s identity papers. I can give them to you. The ones with photographs won’t help, you don’t look like him, but there’s enough without photos that, if you’ve got them, it should establish the fact that you’re him. You can use them to … to open a bank account, to get housing … to do everything you’ll need to do to start a new life.”

I took time to collect my thoughts before replying to this strange and moving offer. At last I asked, “You would be willing to do that? To let me use your brother’s name?”

“Yes, of course! If Masaji knew about all of this, I’m sure he’d think it’s a good idea. And I—I would be honored to have you as my brother.”

“Shinkichi, I am grateful,” I told him. “But … hasn’t your brother’s death already been reported?”

“Ah,” said Mr. Izuma, “that’s where Gojira may have helped us out by wrecking Tokyo. There’s a good chance Masaji’s death registration was lost in the destruction. Even if there is some record of it left, all the government offices will be in a shambles for months. It won’t be anyone’s priority to cross-check and learn that the guy who’s opening a bank account in Tokyo is registered as having died on Odo Island.”

“That could work for a little while,” I argued, “but eventually the discrepancy will be caught. The Odo Island authorities will send a report to the government at the end of the year, won’t they, that includes all the deaths on the island in the past year?”

“Ah, well,” said the indefatigable old codger, “I should be able to take care of that. I used to be Odo Island’s mayor; I know how all that paperwork works. I even know where the current mayor has it all filed. Come the New Year, I can get Mayor Inada drunk—that shouldn’t be difficult! And I can smuggle out his list of the past year’s deaths, and smuggle back in a version that I’ve written, without Masaji’s name on it.”

I stared at the old man, not quite able to believe what I was hearing. I said, “So the fate of the world may depend on you getting the mayor drunk and falsifying some documents?”

“I wouldn’t worry about it if I were you, son,” Izuma said placidly. “I’m sure the fate of the world is regularly held in hands less reliable than mine.”

_Well, that’s true enough,_ I thought. _If_ you _were in charge of the world, Mr. Izuma, I wouldn’t be worried about my discovery becoming the focus of an arms-race._  

I sighed. “This whole idea of yours would work better if I could get out of Japan. I’m too recognizable here. My photograph has probably been in every newspaper in the country. But I don’t see how I could get out. Not without the kind of money the three of us just don’t have.”

There was maddening irony in that, I realized. As Dr. Serizawa Daisuke, I could leave the country easily. I had the money, and it would be no problem at all for me to go abroad on a research trip, or to attend a conference with my international colleagues.

But the whole point of this scheme my companions were hatching was that I couldn’t be Dr. Serizawa Daisuke any longer. I wasn’t him, so I no longer had his privileges and opportunities. If I took on the identity of Sieji Masaji, I would have no more chance to get out of the country than the real Masaji would have had.

“I suppose,” Shinkichi put in a timid suggestion, “you won’t want the Yamanes or Mr. Ogata to know about your being alive? At least the professor? If we could let him in on the secret, Professor Yamane might be able to get you the money you’ll need to leave the country…”

“No!” I said emphatically. “That is the worst thing we could do.”

_Not_ quite _the worst thing,_ I mentally rebutted my own statement. _The worst thing would be for me to present myself to some government and offer to build them the Oxygen Destroyer as a weapon._

But still—if I went along with Shinkichi and Izuma’s plan, and I made this attempt to go on living, then letting any of our friends know the secret seemed like a recipe for catastrophe.

_The more people who know I’m alive,_ I thought, _the more chance there is that governments will learn it, too. And if any politicians or agents suspect it, the Yamanes are the people they will go to first, to try and force them into revealing the truth._

It was in vain that I told myself my fears sounded like they’d come from the same sort of novel as I’d thought was the source for Shinkichi’s “new identity” plot.

Sadly, the things people do in real life are frequently as evil as the deeds in any spy novel.

If government agents suspected I was alive, they might take the Yamanes as hostages—to force me out of hiding, and to pressure me into doing their bidding.

“So you’ll have to stay in Japan,” Mr. Izuma stated. “The plan will still work. You’ll just need to change your appearance. Get a haircut, maybe grow a beard … no one’ll recognize you, even with your picture having been in all the papers.”

Ruefully, I reached up and touched my right hand to my eyepatch.

Izuma seemed unconcerned by that aspect of the question. “Fact is, kid,” he said, “you aren’t the only person in Japan who’s lost an eye. Some of those other people are bound to be young men with long faces and high cheekbones. There’s only so many different types of faces in the world.”

I stared at the old man and the boy. They stared back at me, expectantly, awaiting my answer.

I found I did not know what my answer would be. The idea that I might have some hope was so very foreign to my thoughts. I think I would have had a difficult time adjusting to it, even if I _hadn’t_ spent the past two days attempting to starve myself.

_You can always go along with them for now,_ I told myself, _and still commit suicide later. There is always that way out. If someone figures out you’re Serizawa, and you’re about to be caught, you can just step in front of the nearest train._

At last I murmured, “There is a chance it might work.”

“Good!” Shinkichi joyously exclaimed. “Then you’ll do it?”

For the first time, I saw a smile on the boy’s face. Not merely a smile; this expression of his was a triumphant grin.

“I suppose … I suppose I ought to give it a try.”

“Right!” whooped Mr. Izuma. The sound seemed more like the bark of a dog than like any person’s voice. To my surprise, the old man was grinning slightly. I smiled, myself, at the strangeness of that sight. With a typical younger person’s prejudice, I suppose I’d had the idea that the old codger’s facial muscles were no longer capable of producing a grin.

Leaning my head against the wall of Mr. Izuma’s house, I whispered, “Could I please have that drink of water now?”


	2. Chapter Two: The Dreamer

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Having finally convinced Serizawa Daisuke that he has options besides sacrificing his life, Mr. Izuma and young Shinkichi work to help him create his new existence. Meanwhile, in dreams Serizawa discovers a connection that may bring understanding beyond anything he could have imagined.

**Chapter Two: The Dreamer**

I had spent the better part of the past three days endeavoring to die. The next three days, I spent constructing a new life.

Mr. Izuma was finally able to dose me with plenty of water, tea, broth and rice, of which I partook in numerous judiciously small portions. Shinkichi, meanwhile, brought to me some melancholy relics of his late brother’s life.

He brought a selection of Sieji Masaji’s papers, including his grammar school graduation certificate and his army record. I learned that Private Sieji Masaji had served in Burma, and was a prisoner of war there for several months in 1945.

Masaji, I discovered, had been four years older than I. That age difference imposed on him two years’ service in the army: the dismal closing years of the war. Whereas I had been a seventeen-year-old student in 1945, staying up late to read my chemistry textbooks on that night when the firebombs rained down, burning a quarter of Tokyo to the ground and killing somewhere in the range of 100,000 people.

I fervently hoped that, if I went through with this plan of taking Masaji’s identity, I would not find myself encountering genuine veterans of the Burma Campaign. If any of them tried to speak with me about their time there, I knew I would betray myself with my lack of first-hand knowledge.

I told myself that should not turn out to be a problem. I am certain everyone knows many veterans who never speak of their war experiences. Hopefully I could seem to be yet another of those men.

Of course, if I ever ran into any of Masaji’s genuine comrades from the war, then Shinkichi’s plan really would be in danger of collapsing around me. With “Sieji” being as uncommon a family name as it is, I didn’t think I’d have much luck convincing people I was simply someone else with the same name. Maybe I could make these hypothetical old comrades believe that I was their Masaji’s namesake cousin.

Masaji’s army days seemed to hover about me like an ever-present ghost. The container Shinkichi used to carry his brother’s belongings was Masaji’s army backpack. He also brought the dead man’s army boots.

Those boots fit me reasonably well, considering they had been worn down in patterns shaped by another man’s feet. In the pack, Shinkichi had placed two complete outfits of his brother’s clothing, down to and including the underwear. I will not deny it gave me an odd feeling, being gifted with a dead man’s clothes. Repeatedly I said mental prayers for Masaji’s soul, and asked his forgiveness for appropriating his identity and his belongings.

Masaji and I must have been close to the same size. I assumed he was more muscular than I, since he’d worked as a fisherman instead of a research scientist. But his clothes fit me well enough to make it believable that I might have bought that clothing for myself.

Masaji’s taste in clothes, however, would certainly help to conceal the fact that I was Dr. Serizawa. That sober young scientist would never have dreamed of wearing anything remotely like the two shirts Shinkichi brought me: one of them a vivid dark blue with a pattern of bright yellow flowers, the other one red with orange diamonds.

And speaking of dreams …

The night of that day when Shinkichi and Izuma brought me their plan, was the first time I had truly slept since before Gojira’s death. Perhaps I should find it surprising that my mind was enough at peace to allow me any sleep. It may be that subconsciously I had more faith in my companions’ plan than I held for it in my conscious mind. Or perhaps it was only that sheer physical exhaustion finally took its toll.

The first dream I remember from that night was obviously my own dream. And it requires no psychological training—and not even very much insight—to comprehend what concerns and insecurities led to my dreaming it.

I dreamed Emiko and I were out bicycling together, somewhere in the countryside. Emiko seemed to be around sixteen years old, about the age she was in reality when her father Professor Yamane started actively promoting his idea that she and I should get married. I remember thinking in the dream of how cute Emiko looked with her hair in the pigtails that were her favored hairstyle through her teenaged years. I remember wanting to tease her by pulling her braids, as I frequently used to do a couple of years before that. But at sixteen she had decided she wasn’t a child any more, and she became a fount of good-natured scorn for any childish antics committed by her 21-year-old foster-brother. Deciding that I did not want to hear, just now, her frequently-expressed theories on how females mature emotionally so much earlier than do males, I refrained from pulling her braids.

On a flower-covered hillside we stopped to eat our lunch. Emiko arranged the blanket she had brought, while I fetched the picnic hamper from the basket on the back of my bike. Just as I was setting the hamper down on the blanket, an earthquake struck.

The whole hillside seemed to leap. Emiko and I huddled together on the blanket, each trying to protect the other. Suddenly the earth tore open, right at the edge of our blanket.

I grabbed for the handle of the picnic basket, an instant too late. The basket disappeared over the new-created precipice.

We waited until the movements of the earth appeared to have stopped. Then Emiko and I both crawled upward—for the ground that had formerly sloped slightly downhill, was now a new slope pointing skyward at an angle of 45 degrees—to reach the break in the earth.

About ten meters below us was ground that used to be directly connected with the spot where we now lay peering over the edge. It was as though the earthquake had turned this stretch of ground into a pair of giant’s stairs.

Down there sat our picnic basket. The basket’s lid had fallen open. Instead of a picnic lunch, the basket was filled with the capsule I had built to hold the Oxygen Destroyer.

“I have to get the Oxygen Destroyer back,” I remember saying to Emiko, “before somebody else finds it.”

With the typical illogic of dreams, one of Emiko’s braids had suddenly grown to become hugely long and as thick as a good-sized rope. She swung this massive braid down over the new precipice, while she clung to the ground at the top. Like a mountain-climber, I held on to Emiko’s braid and started climbing down the cliff, toward the Oxygen Destroyer in the picnic basket.

At first our efforts seemed to be going well. Then suddenly the earth of the cliff that I’d been bracing my feet against broke away. I dangled in mid-air by Emiko’s braid-rope, and heard a tiny cry of pain and shock from her. Looking up, I saw Emiko grimacing and digging her hands into the ground to anchor herself in place. A swift glance downward showed me that the piece of earth with the basket on it was now much farther away, probably three times as far down as it had been to begin with.

Despite Emiko’s best efforts, another cry was wrung from her. I looked up at her and saw to my horror that blood was dripping from both her hands as she fought to hold herself there at the top of the cliff.

“Emiko!” I shouted to her. “I’m too heavy for you. You can’t keep holding me up. I’m going to have to let go.”

“No!” she screamed back at me. “No, you can’t! I can hold you. Don’t give up!”

“It’s no use,” I insisted. “It’s no use. If I don’t let go, I’ll drag you down with me. Both of us will be killed!”

“Daisuke!” Emiko yelled. “Don’t let go! Hold on. You can climb back up to me. Daisuke!”

I was gazing up at Emiko, and I suddenly saw a horrifying light behind her. Her form became merely a black silhouette against a blazing, yellow-white glow that seemed to swallow the sky.

That was the moment when the dream changed, and became something else. The only thing that seemed the same was the terrifying light above me.

Now I was underwater, and I was happy to be there. This was home; it was where I belonged. But above the water was something horribly wrong. The light up there seared my eyes and still blazed behind my eyelids when I closed them. Some sort of strange, enormous wave had buffeted me and knocked me away from it, although I couldn’t understand how a wave could reach all the way from the surface to down here where I was. And somehow, the wave had felt hot.

My eyes hurt. I could see, but the imprint of that fearsome light seemed overlaid on my vision. And the skin of my back hurt hideously. I was afraid that if I could look at my back, I would see the skin melting off.

The only thing I could think to do was try to get away from the light and the heat. I turned and swam, as fast as I could. I tried to feel the enjoyment I usually felt when I was swimming, to revel in my own power and speed. But the pain of my back kept twisting through my mind, until I feared I could never think of anything else.

Time made one of its strange dream metamorphoses, and I understood that some significant stretch of time had passed. My pain was more bearable now, but alongside the hurt, my back itched. My eyesight still wasn’t right; still wasn’t the way it had been before that explosion of light. The ghost of that light still seemed to be burned into my eyes.

I was walking along the ocean floor, and I took a pause at a rock outcropping to rub my back against the rocks. It felt good when my spine plates scraped along the rock, but when the skin of my back did the same, the itching pain flared up and I had to stop. I heard myself make a whining growl. I stepped away and turned to look at the rock I’d been rubbing against. What I saw made me feel sick. My blood, mixed with yellow-white pus, was smeared all over the rock where my back had been.

I was hungry, too. Viciously, bitterly hungry. As far as I could tell, all the animals in my usual hunting-ground had died. Thousands of them, it seemed, had simply disappeared. The bodies of others were there, in the water. But when I tried to eat them, they tasted strange and wrong. I had no choice but to leave; to go to one of my other hunting-grounds, though it seemed wrong to leave here at this time of year. But in my life now, that was the least of the things that was wrong.

As I started my migration, alternately walking and swimming, I realized I was angry. Anger churned in me, as strong as my hunger and the maddening pain of my back. I was angry at whatever up there had changed so much for me; at whatever killed those animals, caused my pain, created that haunting light. I told myself I would find food, get my strength back, and then I would go up there, up to the surface.

Something up there had done this, and I would pay them back. They had sent pain to me, so I would bring pain to them. And if I could punish them enough, if I could cause them enough pain—perhaps I could stop them from doing this to anyone else, ever again.

A hand on my shoulder jolted me awake. I heard old Izuma’s voice saying quietly, “Hey, kid. Wake up.”

“I’m awake,” I told him. My mind felt strangely clear, without the vagueness that so frequently accompanies waking. I felt almost as though I hadn’t been asleep at all.

“Guess you were having a nightmare,” Izuma said. “You were making some groaning and growling noises. And a few times you said, ‘It hurts.’ Do you feel all right now?”

“Yes,” I answered. “Yes, I’m fine.”

Izuma had an old kerosene lamp on the floor beside him. Its dim light showed enough for me to see that he and I were alone in the house.

I asked, “Where’s Shinkichi?”

The old man said, “He took some quilts outside so he could sleep out there.”

“Outside?” I repeated. “He couldn’t sleep with the noise I was making? You should have wakened me sooner.”

“No,” Izuma said, “it wasn’t that. He went outside before you started making noise. He told me he can’t sleep inside, here. My guess is, my house looks too much the same as his house here used to. When he tries to sleep in here … he must feel as though Gojira is coming back. As though what happened to his family is going to happen again.”

“Yes,” I whispered.

I had no trouble imagining what it must be like for the boy. I felt certain that Izuma’s theory was correct. That kind of fear was only too familiar to me.

It made me think of the year of the bombings, 1945, when I had been one year older than Shinkichi was now. For months out of that year I hardly dared to close my one remaining eye. I felt sure that every time I tried to sleep, it would start again: the air raid sirens; the B-29s’ engines growling above us. And the fires.

And all too frequently, my fears and the fears of so many others had come true.

Then there came the time when the raids weren’t only at night. At any hour of the night or day, the sirens and the bombers’ engines might be heard again.

That was when I, like so many others, almost stopped caring. When I thought of the fact that the next raid could be the one in which I burned to death, the only possible answer seemed to be, “It can’t be helped.”

“Try going back to sleep,” Mr. Izuma told me.

I nodded, and obeyed him. The sleep which followed brought me no dreams that I remember.

This next element of my story is one I have difficulty explaining. But during that next day in Mr. Izuma’s house, I didn’t think much at all about the dream I had had. In spite of how strange I suppose it should have felt, that dream seemed like something which didn’t require much thinking. It seemed something natural, unsurprising; like a dream it made sense for me to dream.

Most of that day I spent talking with Shinkichi. Or, rather, he spent it talking with me. He shared with me memories and anecdotes of Masaji; anything he could think of that might help me support the fiction of being Masaji myself. In particular, he told me everything he could remember that Masaji had said about his time in the army.

I was happy for Shinkichi to talk. It wasn’t so much that his stories could be useful to me—although, of course, they might. More importantly, it seemed clear that talking about his brother was doing Shinkichi some good.

That night, in the matter-of-fact way in which unusual acts can become normal, Shinkichi took an armload of quilts outside when the three of us retired to bed. I remember thinking that I would not be surprised if I had another dream like the one the night before. And reality turned out to follow the path of my expectations.

I don’t remember any dream of my own that night. I just remember the other dream.

This time, I was above the water, as I’d planned to be in the previous dream. I came up at night, since then there was not as much light to hurt my eyes. But there were still plenty of lights. There were more than enough lights to show me exactly where my enemies were.

They seemed to be all about lights. Little lights sprang out of the darkness at me the moment I started toward shore. Sometimes small bursts of pain accompanied those lights, but those pains were so tiny they felt hardly worth noticing. Certainly they seemed meaningless compared to the pain of my back. That pain was a great deal less now than what it had been, but it was still there, still always a part of me.

On shore, I met more lights along a strange new barrier, a long wall built out of spiny structures that were taller than me. That barrier hadn’t existed when I came ashore here before. I guessed it was a blockade the little land animals had built to stop me from getting to them.

It didn’t work, of course. Their blockade gave me the chance to show off a new ability I’d acquired.

I didn’t think I’d been able to do it before—not until the horrible light came down into the water and hurt me. Maybe, strangely, this new ability was a benefit that went along with the pain; a kind of balancing factor that made the pain more worth having.

Now, when I wanted to, I could breathe out a stream of light. That light was faint compared to the blast that had hurt me, but it was still bright enough that I didn’t like looking directly into it. I kept my eyes averted from the light when I breathed it out.

Painful though my light was for me to see, I thought it was worth the pain. My light caused the barrier the land animals had built to collapse in front of me. The spiny thing that I breathed on glowed and then melted, writhingly sinking down into itself. I strode over and through, taking satisfaction in tearing up more of their barrier with my hands, and smashing it with my tail.

I walked into the place where the small land creatures lived, their strange, busy warren of structures and lights. If they liked light so much, I thought, well, I would give them light. I would give them more light than they wanted.

I breathed out my own new light onto the animals’ structures. Everywhere I breathed it, those structures caught fire.

I’m not sure how long I spent going through the land animals’ warren—breathing on it, stomping it, smashing. I do know that what made me decide to stop was the fires. They had gotten to be too many; they were too bright now for me to comfortably look at them. I decided to go home, back into the peace and comfort of the water. I turned and started back toward the shore.

They sent more lights after me as I was leaving, flying lights that whizzed past my head and sometimes burst with tiny ineffectual stings against my skin. I ignored them as I walked into the water, feeling satisfied with myself for a job well done.

Once again, when I woke up, it was with a feeling of utter clarity. I knew without question who and where I was. I also knew without doubt who I had been in the dream. And I felt certain I understood what these dreams meant.

There was a pale hint of light in the house. I thought it must be near dawn.

“Mr. Izuma?” I asked quietly.

“I’m here,” old Izuma’s voice answered out of the dimness.

“Was I growling again?”

“A bit. You weren’t saying ‘It hurts’ this time, though. I guess maybe that’s an improvement?”

“Yes,” I said, “I guess it probably is. I’m sorry I woke you up again,” I went on.

“It’s all right. I don’t usually sleep that well these days anyhow. Too many aches and pains and too many memories.”

Moving quickly onward from that statement which perhaps had revealed more than he wanted it to, Izuma said, “It’s nearly morning. Shall we go outside and join Shinkichi? We can watch the dawn.”

“All right,” I answered.

So the old man and I wrapped quilts around our shoulders like capes and made our way outside.

Shinkichi’s retreat was only a little distance away. It looked comfortable enough, as such things go. He was snuggled against a bush to give him some shelter if the wind came up, but he could see open sky above him—open sky to constantly assure him that he was not inside a house which Gojira would soon destroy.

The boy must already have been awake. He sat up immediately as our host and I approached.

“Is anything wrong?” he whispered.

“No,” replied Izuma, sounding unflappable as usual. “We’re just here to watch the sunrise.”

Shinkichi stayed sitting up, and we two settled down beside him. There the three of us sat: three quilt-shrouded figures in a row, on a hilltop gazing out at black water and a slowly paling sky.

I wondered about that water. I wondered how long it would be before the water again had oxygen enough in it for organisms to begin repopulating. Was there sufficient oxygen in it, already, now?

I had experimented with that in my lab, of course. I knew the results when I’d left oxygen-depleted aquariums open to the air. But I wished I could study how those results translated to a stretch of open sea in which the oxygen had been destroyed.

_I can’t study it,_ I reminded myself. _I can’t do anything connected with scientific research, ever again. The more I allow myself to act like Dr. Serizawa, the more risk there is that some government’s agents will find me._

I thought instead about the two dreams I’d had. I wondered if I would continue having these dreams for every night of my life.

I felt certain I knew what had happened, although it sounded ridiculous to me when I expressed the thought in my mind.

_I am possessed by the spirit of Gojira._

_That really does sound too ludicrous,_ I thought. _There must be some better way of putting it; something that doesn’t make it sound as though Gojira is causing me to stomp around and attempt to crush Tokyo._

_The spirit of Gojira communicates with me through dreams. How’s that; does that sound better?_

I suppose I will seem a truly odd scientist, admitting that I believed in this possession. As a scientist, one might say, I should have been skeptical on the question. I should have hypothesized that the dreams were creations of my subconscious and my imagination.

There must be thousands of Japanese who are regularly having nightmares about Gojira. The great beast couldn’t cause terror for weeks and then devastate our capital city _without_ making its way into our dreams.

But, odd scientist or no, I believed what my senses told me.

My senses stated with uncompromising certainty that these dreams were not mine. They were the memories of Gojira, somehow being transmitted to me.

What it actually _meant_ , of course, would require a great deal more thinking to determine, and perhaps even then I would not fully find the answer.

Was the spirit of Gojira actively communicating with me, sending me its memories in an effort to explain and justify its actions?

Was it not a conscious communication at all, but rather some manner of telepathic connection that was created down there under the water, when Gojira’s eye met mine?

Was I, in some way, carrying the spirit of Gojira within me?

Did the communication only go in one direction? Or was Gojira—or Gojira’s spirit—somehow picking up on my thoughts, in return? Was Gojira aware of my existence as I was aware of it?

All of these questions made me long to return to my own life. How I wished I could speak about all of this with Emiko—and, even more so, with her father.

I wished I could tell Professor Yamane that I believed he’d been correct in his theory of Gojira’s origin. That first dream, I believed, showed the accuracy of Yamane’s hypothesis that Gojira came into our world as a result of nuclear tests.

I could still hear in my memory the professor’s exhilarated voice over the phone, as he told me about their expedition to Odo Island. I could hear him enthusing, “Serizawa, there are strontium-90 readings in the creature’s footprints! I believe this must be a member of a dinosaur species that has survived in the deep ocean—as perhaps the Loch Ness Monster’s species has done, as well. A recent nuclear detonation must have damaged or destroyed its habitat; that’s why we’re first seeing it now …”

Yamane had theorized that the test at Bikini Atoll in March was what had set Gojira loose on us. Now I felt certain he was right. That test—an experiment which we already knew had become a disaster with far-reaching consequences—had injured and mutated Gojira and had wiped out the great creature’s food supply. Between the time of the Bikini Atoll test and Gojira’s first appearance, there had been five months for the mighty animal to heal and rebuild its strength. And then Gojira had appeared—sinking ship after ship and finally bringing its quest for revenge onto the land.

The second dream had told me that Gojira understood the “little land animals” were the source of its pain and of all the grim changes in its life. It made perfect sense for Gojira to strike back at the first “little land animals” it encountered. And it was simply our bad luck that the first little land animals Gojira encountered happened to be the people of Japan.

I pondered the question, _Could we somehow have convinced Gojira that the blast wasn’t our fault; that we have been victims of it as well? That it was our fishermen who were irradiated by the blast; that the fish which should have been our country’s food supply are now filled with radioactive poison?_

They were pointless thoughts. Even if Gojira and I were truly communicating in some way now, that link had only formed as Gojira was dying.

_And what if we could have convinced Gojira it was the Americans’ fault, and not ours? Would it really have been any better for us to send Gojira to America looking for revenge?_

_The ordinary people of America weren’t the ones who detonated that bomb at Bikini Atoll. The millions of ordinary Americans didn’t deserve to have Gojira on a quest to destroy them, any more than Japan’s millions deserved it._

I thought, _In the end, it doesn’t matter who invented it or who set it off. Americans, Japanese, Soviets … if it hadn’t been the Americans who invented the bomb and used it first, somebody else would have done it._

_As humans, we’re all to blame. And as humans, it’s the duty of all of us to find some way of stopping it._

_Stopping it, before it destroys us all—humans, all living things, the planet._

_And if we don’t stop it soon enough, maybe other beings like Gojira will take matters into their hands. Maybe they will destroy us before we can destroy the world._

The sun was now a sliver of red, lighting up the edge of the sea. I felt grateful for the color of that sunrise. It reassured me to see a light which was not the hideous yellow-white explosion from Gojira’s memories.

_Gojira’s memories,_ I thought, _and the memories of hundreds of humans._

I thought back to the news reports I had read and heard about the Bikini Atoll travesty. How the bomb had gone off with a force three times what their scientists predicted. How it rained down ash on evacuated islanders and on the crew of the _Lucky Dragon Number Five_ , eighty-plus miles away. About the islanders thinking the ash was snow, and their children playing in it—God, even opening their mouths to swallow it as it drifted out of the sky. And of a crewmember of the _Lucky Dragon_ who had been on deck and witnessed the explosion, telling one of his crewmates, “The sun is rising in the west …”

I wondered what the boy and the old man who sat to either side of me were thinking now.

An obvious guess was that Shinkichi was thinking of his aunt and his brother. As for old Mr. Izuma, who knew what or whom might be in his thoughts?

Likely, I supposed, he was thinking of whatever or whomever he had meant when he told me his memories kept him from sleep.

I thought again of my foster-father, Professor Yamane. What a wonderful gift to him it would be—a gift that only I in all the world had the power to give him! An opportunity for a paleontologist to study, first-hand, a creature whose species had survived from the Jurassic Age …

He had thought the opportunity would be destroyed with the death of Gojira. But now, through these dreams I was having, perhaps I could give him that opportunity again.

_Except you can’t,_ I sternly reminded myself. _You know you can’t. That longing of his—just like your longing to give him this gift—must both remain unfulfilled._

My old fears and objections were all as valid as ever. I _couldn’t_ go back to my life. I couldn’t allow any politician or government to discover that I was alive.

Serizawa Daisuke had to remain dead. My life could summon into existence a threat to humanity and to the world that was as devastating as the atomic bomb—and far more devastating than Gojira.

The red of the sunrise was spreading over the deep. I sighed, glad that the night was as good as done. We had work enough planned for the day ahead of us that it should spare me from the risks of too much thought.

Since we were getting an unusually early start to the day, we decided we would begin that day by bathing. This was something of which I, at least, stood in considerable need.

As a supposedly dead man, I could hardly jaunt into the village to use the public bathhouse. So we used the old wooden tub out behind Mr. Izuma’s house.

Like most of what we were undertaking, the preparation of that bath was a laborious project. Izuma and Shinkichi made a couple of bucket-hauling trips to the nearest well on the other side of the island, since there was concern that the wells on this side were still radioactive as a result of Gojira’s visit. Again, being a fugitive, I couldn’t venture into public to assist them with the water-carrying. But at least I was able to help by firing up the stove to heat the water.

After we three conspirators had bathed and then breakfasted, Mr. Izuma went on a mission to the medical clinic in the village. He returned with a sizable supply of surgical gauze and tape. With this I could construct a bandage and makeshift eyepatch that should make me stand out less in a crowd than did the distinctive black eyepatch I sported in all those television broadcasts and newspaper photos. I hoped Izuma had managed to abscond with the supplies surreptitiously without needing to explain why he wanted them, since we were striving to leave behind our identity-building campaign as few traces as possible.

I hated the thought of wearing such bandaging, although I voiced no complaint.

I knew that wearing it would call up stark memories of when I’d worn bandaging like that before. It would be difficult for me not to feel that I was back in that time, when I had first received treatment for my burns and the loss of my eye.

Even more than I disliked the prospect of that bandage, I hated submitting to Izuma cutting my hair. I had agreed to go along with all of this; to permit my companions to build this new identity for me so that I could continue to live. So, again, I made no objection in words. But, petty though it was, I mourned the cutting of my hair more than most of the things I was sacrificing with my true identity.

My hair, with its long-on-the-top style, was one of the few aspects of my appearance for which I still felt much fondness. Emiko used to say she enjoyed playing with my hair—back in the days before she met Ogata Hideto. And having good-looking hair was one way I could still aspire to handsomeness. It reassured me to think that perhaps my hair went some way toward counterbalancing my scars and my missing eye.

I think the deepest motivation was that I felt so grateful I could grow my hair long at all, after half of my head was burned bald when the shrapnel took out my eye.

It was in inward bitterness that I sat there with no sound of complaint, sacrificing my hair to Mr. Izuma’s barbering. When he was done, he and his scissors had created for me a crewcut nearly as short as Shinkichi’s.

Not having shaved since I left home on the day before Gojira’s death, I already had the stubbly beginnings of a mustache and beard. “Stubbly beginnings” were just about as good as that mustache and beard would ever get, considering the difficulties my body has in summoning up any kind of facial hair.

I changed clothes completely and donned one of poor Masaji’s outfits—choosing the red and orange shirt, since I’d decided it was slightly less loud than the blue one with the yellow flowers.

To complete my new look, I needed to discard my eyepatch. My hands were trembling slightly as I untied it and put it aside, forcing myself to give up that vital symbol of who I truly was.

Shinkichi and Mr. Izuma had left me alone while I changed. I could hear them outside the house, talking quietly together. In a hand-mirror propped up on Mr. Izuma’s dining table, I grimly regarded my scar tissue-filled eye socket. Then I set about constructing a bandage eyepatch, along with bandages to cover the other scars on my face. My thought was to conceal the fact that my scars were old, and pass myself off as someone who had been injured recently in Gojira’s attacks.

When I was done with that work, I contemplated without surprise how much I disliked my new appearance.

My sparse facial hair gave me a bit of a lifeline; some visual reassurance that this was August 1954, not March 1945. That beard and mustache helped me keep hold of the fact that I was a man of 27, with a doctorate in chemistry; an internationally known and respected scientist, even though I could no longer admit to that identity—instead of the person I had been when I first wore bandages like that. No matter how those bandages made me feel, I was not the disfigured teenager who had just lost every person in his family in a single night.

I didn’t want to risk stepping outside, on the off-chance that some islander might be within sight of Izuma’s house. Walking to the door, I called softly to my fellow-plotters, “All right. You can come in and tell me what you think.”

What Shinkichi thought was expressed by his startled expression and a whispered, “Wow.” As for old Izuma, he looked me up and down and then declared, “You’ll do, kid. You don’t look much at all like that famous scientist in the newspaper photos.”

Ruefully I rubbed one hand over my newly-sheared head. It seemed bizarre to feel the crewcut’s fuzziness instead of being able to run my fingers through my hair. Seeing that Izuma and Shinkichi were both still staring at me, I lowered my hand and remarked, “It will take me a while to get used to the haircut. I’m probably going to be rubbing my head all the time, like the hero in _Seven Samurai_.” That comparison had popped into my mind because _Seven Samurai_ was the most recent film I’d gone to with Emiko and her father.

“It’ll be all right if you do that,” Shinkichi told me, in a surprisingly shaky voice. “Masaji used to do that all the time, too.”

His expression suddenly crumpled into grief. The boy lowered his head and began to sob, though he fought to suppress the sound. His shoulders jolted with his efforts to hold back his sobs.

With the futile wish that I could do something to actually help him, I reached out and gripped his shoulder. Shinkichi nodded in acknowledgement of my gesture and hastily rubbed away his tears.

Sounding perhaps even gruffer than usual, old Izuma said, “Well, let’s get going. We’ve still got work to do.”

Having now created my new appearance, our next task was to efface the evidence of Serizawa Daisuke’s presence on this island. Under cover of darkness the previous night, Izuma and Shinkichi had retrieved the diving gear from the bushes where Izuma had hidden it. The plan we’d decided upon was to use the diving suit and my clothes to create an effigy of me. That effigy, we would throw into the sea.

Izuma had inaugurated that phase of our plans when he pointed out, “All our hard work will go for nothing if anybody finds that diving suit on Odo Island. There’s no way that suit could be here on land unless you survived.”

Shinkichi had asked, “But won’t people think it’s strange if the diving suit washes up somewhere, too? Shouldn’t the suit just have … just have disintegrated along with you and Gojira?”

“No,” was my answer. “It makes perfect sense for the suit to survive. The Destroyer only worked on living things. I experimented with that in my lab. In multiple tests, the Destroyer’s element dissolved fish and plants, but it left undamaged all the items of fabric, metal and plastic that I placed in the aquariums.”

Izuma observed ruefully, “Of course, with you being dead, there’ll be no handy expert around to explain that to people. Well, I guess they’ll figure it out. If anybody ever does find the suit at all.”

It was now our macabre job to reassemble the diving suit with my clothing inside, to replicate the conditions if I had been wearing the clothing and gear and my body disintegrated. Going about this process, I felt more than a few mental twinges of discomfort.

Into the weighted shoes Shinkichi placed my socks, which he had diligently washed to remove all traces of my walk across the beach and up the hill. Grimly I arranged my undershorts inside my trousers and my undershirt inside my shirt. I buckled my belt as it would be buckled if I were there inside the clothes. Izuma and Shinkichi then held the diving suit open while I laid out the empty clothing in its proper placement within the suit.

All three of us working together, we went through the painstaking steps of doing up the suit’s many fastenings and setting into place its multiple straps, belt and weights. I attached the gloves to the sleeves’ cuffs, although I doubted the gloves would still be in place if the suit was ever washed up and found. We also did up all the straps and lacings attaching the shoes to the suit, though those, too, I thought unlikely to remain attached, without an actual body inside to help hold them in place.

Before we started bolting the helmet back onto the suit, I placed inside it my bandana, tied as though it still encircled my head. I had meant to do the same with my eyepatch. But I hesitated, miserably staring at that forlorn black object as I held it in my hands.

Izuma saw and understood my hesitation. “You know, kid,” he pointed out, “I think you can keep the eyepatch if you want to. That port on the helmet is broken, after all. I had to break it so you could breathe before we got the helmet off you. If anyone finds all this and identifies it as yours, I think they’ll believe your eyepatch got swept away through the broken port. I’m betting no one will figure the missing eyepatch means that you didn’t die in there.”

I glanced over at him, startled. I had never previously considered the question of when or how that port of the helmet had been broken.

“Thank you,” I told Izuma quietly. I was thanking him both for the multiple times he’d saved my life, and for saving my eyepatch for me. Taking his advice, I went and stashed away the eyepatch deeply inside Sieji Masaji’s backpack.

When we’d completed our work, there was something profoundly horrible to me about that bodiless diver. We covered it with quilts, in case this unluckily proved to be that rare day on which one of the other villagers decided to pay Mr. Izuma a visit. But hidden away though it was, the effigy would haunt me until we could give it up to the waves.

To the bottom of my heart, I hoped the empty suit would never be found. I wanted the last contact that Emiko and her father had with me to be those final words I’d spoken from the ocean floor. I wanted to leave them with the sound of my voice saying “farewell.”

I did not want them to learn about the empty diving suit being washed ashore. I didn’t want them to confront its reality; to be forced to imagine me inside that suit, my body disintegrating to its constituent atoms.

Concern that someone might observe our actions made us wait to dispose of our creation until the return of darkness. The moon was up and close to full—fortunately for me, who did not know the island’s paths like the back of my hand as did Izuma and Shinkichi. Even with the moon, I would still have been stumbling all over the place had Izuma not been there to guide me.

The old man led our procession. Behind him Shinkichi and I followed, carrying the diving suit still wrapped in quilts. I fought with myself not to dwell on the impression which played vividly through my mind: that we really were on our way to dispose of a dead body.

Along a meandering trail Izuma led us to a steep promontory about five minutes’ walk from his home. He and Shinkichi had assured me that the cliffs at that point went straight down to the water. They had no out-thrusting rocks on which the suit could become caught as it fell. In addition, Izuma stated that the tide was high when we set out on this expedition. There would be nothing to stop the ocean from carrying the empty suit away from us.

The path out to the cliff’s edge was overgrown—or at least the animals or people who usually followed that path were not burdened with any item as bulky as a diving suit. Shinkichi frequently muttered “Damn it” as we made our way along. Only my desire to seem a responsible adult and to set a good example for the boy prevented me from saying the same or worse.

To my relief, for the last few meters the way was clear, just a platform of smooth rock. There was room for Izuma to stand over to the side and supervise, and for Shinkichi and me to properly swing our burden.

The moonlight painted the scene an appropriately spectral white. The rock beneath our feet looked as white as the moon itself, and the path of the moon glimmered dancingly along the waves.

Mr. Izuma retrieved his quilts from around the diving suit. Then he got out of the way. Shinkichi and I adjusted our grips on the suit, I holding it by the armpits and Shinkichi grasping the ankles. We swung it back and forth as Izuma counted for us. When we heaved it toward the water on Izuma’s “three,” we let go.

For a moment the suit looked to me like some flying spirit or monster as it arced through the air. I was fairly sure I saw one of the shoes fly loose from the rest of the suit and plummet downward on its own. Almost before I had time to feel disturbed at the weird sight it all made, the diving suit had disappeared from view.

I wondered if Izuma and Shinkichi were thinking the same as what I was thinking. It had struck me forcibly how close our actions just now must be to those of men of ancient times, making some sort of ritual offering to the sea. It seemed precisely the sort of thing that anthropologists write whole volumes about: how in the farthest past our ancestors made human sacrifices to propitiate the gods, and then as millennia passed, the practices became tamed, with effigies offered as sacrifices in the place of actual men or women.

I thought, _It's certainly fitting for me to make some sacrifice to propitiate any gods of the sea around here. After all, I am the one who wounded this stretch of sea and wiped out all of its life._

_And I did try to give those gods a human sacrifice,_ my thoughts added. _I tried to give them myself._

_Apparently, that sacrifice wasn’t accepted, since the ocean spat me back out again._

With Izuma once again in the lead, we retraced our path to his home.

The three of us had one more night to pass together. We had agreed that on the next morning, both Shinkichi and I would take the ferry to Tokyo.

I dreamed a third dream that Gojira sent to me that night. But this dream, I will not describe in detail.

Unlike the other two, this dream left me in considerable distress when I awoke. I lay there feeling sick with grief and wishing the dream had not come to me.

Perhaps it is strange that this dream should have troubled me, when the other two had not. One might think this one would be less disturbing than my second dream from Gojira—which, after all, concerned the deaths of thousands of people.

But this one hit me differently, even though for Gojira the events in the dream were a source of wonder and satisfaction.

This dream showed me the first time that Gojira discovered its new capability of breathing fire. And it showed me what Gojira had destroyed with its new fire: the fishing trawler _Eiko Maru_ , and every man aboard her.

What those men had seen and gone through haunted me when I awoke, although I’d suffered no troubling afterimages from the dream of Tokyo’s destruction.

Perhaps it is because those men on the _Eiko Maru_ had no warning of what was coming for them. At least in Tokyo there had been some warning. There had been evacuation orders, attempts at defense—even though those attempts ended in failure. But the crew of the _Eiko Maru_ had been relaxing on deck on a peaceful summer evening, and the sea about them erupted into flames.


	3. Chapter Three: The New Masaji

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Serizawa Daisuke rides the ferry from Odo Island to Tokyo, taking his first real steps into his life as Sieji Masaji.

**Chapter Three: The New Masaji**  

I kept quiet after waking from that dream, to escape the risk that I might have to talk about it. I just lay there and waited for dawn.

Mr. Izuma said nothing either. I don’t know if perhaps this time I hadn’t been growling in my sleep, or if my growls had become familiar enough to Izuma after two nights of hearing them that this time he’d slept through them. Or perhaps, instead, he simply said nothing because he judged there was nothing to say.

Our last breakfast together had a strange emotional quality to it. Izuma and I were both grimly quiet. Shinkichi, by contrast, talked frenetically, with a volubility that almost seemed feverish. He talked about the school on the outskirts of Tokyo in which Professor Yamane had enrolled him. The semester would be starting in a couple of weeks. Shinkichi talked to us about the classes he would be taking there, I suppose in the hope that if he just kept on talking, he could avoid thinking of the fact that the three of us would soon part.

After breakfast, Izuma and Shinkichi each gave me what money they could spare. Izuma said as he handed me a small pile of banknotes, “You might as well have this instead of me. There’s not much to spend money on, here on the island. I’m sorry it’s not more. But it’ll pay for your ferry ticket, and help keep you going until you get a job.”

Shinkichi handed me some banknotes as well. He mentioned that it was spending money Professor Yamane had given him for the trip to Odo Island.

I objected, “But if the professor should ask how you spent the money …?”

“I won’t need to lie to him much,” Shinkichi answered. “I’ll tell him I gave the money to some of the islanders who have to relocate to the mainland. After all,” he added, “he would want you to have it, if he knew. This is so much less than the professor would want to give you, if only he could.”

These emotionally-laden mentions of the professor were starting to worry me. “Remember, Shinkichi,” I urged him, “it’s desperately important that you not tell the Yamanes about me. If any government’s agents learn I’m alive, the Yamanes will be in danger. You have got to keep the secret, in order to protect Emiko and the professor.”

“I know it,” the boy told me firmly. “I’ll keep the secret—to protect them and you.”

The time for our parting had come. Shinkichi seemed on the verge of tears, but this time he succeeded in restraining them. He said, “I wish I could see you again, Dr. Serizawa. But I guess that would be dangerous, too. I guess if there’s contact between us, that might end up exposing the secret.”

“I’m afraid it might,” I agreed. “But I’d like to come back to visit here, from time to time, if Mr. Izuma will permit me. That way, at least, you and I will be able to keep in touch through him.”

Izuma gave one of his snorts. “You’ll be welcome anytime, kid. I would invite you to keep on living here with me. But I know you’ll tell me there’d be too much risk of some reporter or scientist or secret agent tracking you down, if you’re living here. Still, come visit me whenever you want to. I’ve had fun saving the world with you.”

I had to smile at that. Shinkichi smiled, too; a very small smile. I said, “I couldn’t ask for better companions in saving the world than the two of you.”

Turning directly to Shinkichi, I told him, “Thank you, Shinkichi. Thank you for everything you have done for me.” I bowed a medium-depth bow as I said that. Shinkichi bowed back to me, looking startled and embarrassed that one of his elders should make so deep a bow to him.

Since we needed to avoid the appearance of there being any connection between us, Shinkichi and I could not arrive at the ferry together. As we had planned, I waited about ten minutes after the boy had left. Then I bowed to Mr. Izuma and took the path down the hill alone.

When I reached the beach below, I paused to contemplate the difference between now and the last time I had been here. Six days ago, I had knelt on this beach, desperate to die. My greatest longing had been to walk into the ocean and end my life. Now I had the mobility and strength I was lacking then. Now I could easily succeed in killing myself, if I still wanted to.

I was testing my feelings, much in the way one might prod at a wound in order to check if it still hurt. What I found in that prodding was that my desire to kill myself had well and truly gone.

Of course I knew I still might need to do it. Someday, the discovery of my true identity might make suicide my only course. But it was not the course I had to follow now.

Now I had to repay my debt to Shinkichi and Mr. Izuma by giving this new life a fair try. I would be betraying them, making worthless all the work the three of us had done together, if I threw away this life they’d created for me without even giving it a chance.

Shoving aside twinges of uneasiness over the thought that I was walking in Sieji Masaji’s boots, I hiked along the beach. I followed the path that wound over an outcropping of rocks, made my way along another beach, and then I reached the little pier at Odo Village, just as the ferry came steaming into view.

A modest crowd was awaiting the ferry, young Sieji Shinkichi among them. I saw that Shinkichi’s story he’d told the Yamanes about helping fellow islanders move to the mainland was going to prove completely believable. The crowd included several clusters of people who were clearly doing just that, surrounded as they were by bags, suitcases, bundles of bedding and a few items of furniture. Shinkichi was talking with one family who stood with their belongings all around them. Among them were a boy and a girl who both seemed near Shinkichi’s age. I supposed they had been his schoolfellows, before Gojira tore his life apart and Professor Yamane took responsibility for Shinkichi as his new foster son.

Unsurprisingly, I felt nearly as conspicuous as Gojira when I joined that crowd around the pier. In my overheated imagination I pictured the islanders pointing at me and yelling denunciations: from the revelation that I was Dr. Serizawa Daisuke, to an accusation that I had stolen the late Sieji Masaji’s clothes.

In the event, no one paid me the least attention apart from a few curious looks. Naturally, the people around me knew I was no Odo Islander. Who I might actually be, however, did not seem of much interest to them. I suppose if any of them did think about it, they assumed I had come here on some earlier ferry—from devastated Tokyo, most likely, since I was obviously injured.

I was almost the last one to file aboard the ferry, waiting until the relocating families had moved all their luggage and furniture aboard. I bought my ticket from the purser at the top of the ramp and then found myself a spot on a bench by the railing on deck, near the vessel’s prow. This would be my base of operations for the nine-hour voyage to Tokyo.

That trip took about twice as long as it had taken us to reach these waters in the hunt for Gojira, as should not have been surprising to me. This was, after all, an ordinary ferry that stopped off at all the islands, not a ship on a military/scientific expedition sponsored by the Japanese government.

Most of that ferry-ride to Tokyo I spent standing at the rail, watching the water. I wished that I could tell just by looking at it where the Oxygen Destroyer’s range had ended, and the undamaged ocean began.

I knew we must have reached a point at which the water was healthy when a trio of dolphins came swimming alongside the boat, leaping playfully beside us and drawing delighted exclamations from many of the people on deck. A group of children and youths ran along the deck near the railing, attempting to keep the dolphins in their sight. That group, I saw, consisted of Shinkichi and the boy and girl I’d seen him talking with earlier, along with three younger children. Shinkichi passed close by me in the midst of the dolphin-chase. He and I shared a quick, wistful smile when he nodded his head in apparent apology for having nearly run into me.

Later there came a moment when a school of flying fish flitted past us, iridescent scales and wing-like fins catching the afternoon light. I heard no appreciative comments from anyone, and I wondered if I was the only passenger who had seen them. The sight of them started me wondering whether any flying fish in the Oxygen Destroyer’s range might have been able to get away fast enough to escape from its destruction. It wasn’t likely, I supposed; not unless they had already been at the very outer edge of its effectiveness.

At just past six o’clock in the evening the ferry came in sight of Takeshiba Pier.

The view of Tokyo that presented itself caused me to gasp in dismay. Around me, I heard others gasping as well, and muttering words of shock and grief.

Before setting out on the hunt for Gojira I had seen television news images of devastated Tokyo, and I saw much of that devastation for myself on the car-rides to the government’s temporary headquarters and then onward to the port. But I suppose on those rides I had been too insulated by my own concerns to really pay much attention to what I was seeing. I had been focusing on everything we needed to do in order to give the Oxygen Destroyer its best chance of succeeding against Gojira—and on what I needed to do to end my life along with the life of the monster.

I thought that seeing Tokyo from the water, now, was like meeting an old friend one has not seen in years, who in the meantime has become ravaged by illness or age. Or perhaps, I thought, it was like encountering that old friend after he had suffered some shocking disfigurement to his face.

That view blended the familiar with the horribly different. Some expected features of the skyline were glaringly absent. Others were visible when they ought not to have been, for the buildings that should have blocked them from our sight were gone.

The buildings at Takeshiba Pier had not escaped the destruction, although it was clear that this portion of the city had avoided the fires. Only about half of the passenger terminal was still standing. The rest of the building, nearer to the street, was a hopeless pile of rubble. From the look of it, I thought it likely that Gojira had stepped on the building. The pier itself had clearly undergone recent reconstruction. The area where the ferry came to dock was built out of bright, shining new wood. It looked, in fact, as through the construction might have been completed only today.

Along with many other passengers, I had gravitated to the boat’s starboard side to gain as clear a view as I could of our wounded city. There were fortunately enough others around me that I was able to step behind some of them and efface myself in the background, when I recognized three of the people who stood waiting on the pier.

I had known to expect them. Shinkichi had told me they would be there to meet him. But forewarned though I was, the sight of them brought a surge of emotions far more painful than I expected.

There stood lovely Emiko, my foster-sister and erstwhile fiancée. There, to her left, stood her father. The sight of him, so comfortingly familiar to me, nonetheless opened a wound in my soul with the thought that I could never speak with him again.

And there, to Emiko’s right, stood Ogata Hideto, her boyfriend. Or, I supposed, he was likely her fiancé, now, since her previous fiancé theoretically had died on the ocean floor about a week ago.

There Ogata was, his clean-cut, straightforward self, standing where I wanted to be standing. I thought that he looked as perfect and squeaky-clean as if Emiko had just purchased him at a department store.

Sternly I ordered myself—as I had done a number of times before—to curb my hostility against the man. I reminded myself that Ogata had not been deliberately attacking me by creating the situation in which we’d found ourselves. It was simply one of those things that happened.

I told myself it wasn’t Emiko’s fault, either. Nor was it mine. There was no point in thinking about “fault” in this matter at all.

Certainly it was fair for Emiko to prefer a future husband who did not have the emotional baggage I tend to lug around with me. I could easily comprehend that Emiko’s ideal husband would not be a man who spends half his time in the cellar brooding over the potential destruction of our planet. And it was more than fair for her to believe that her father’s wishes in the matter were not sufficient motivation for us to marry.

Fifty years ago, they would have been enough. They were not enough anymore.

Shinkichi managed to be one of the first passengers who hurried down the gangplank. Half hidden, I watched from the corner of my eye as the Yamanes and Ogata welcomed the boy. I saw Emiko’s radiant smile; saw the professor reach out and clasp Shinkichi’s shoulder. Ogata said something, in response to which Shinkichi reached up and rubbed his crewcut—just as I had done after Izuma cut my hair, and as Shinkichi had told me his brother Masaji used to do. Then the four of them walked away together.

I wished Emiko would turn back for a last glance at the ferry boat, the way she might have done if we were characters in a movie. I wanted this to be like that hypothetical film. I wanted her to give one last, lingering look toward the ferry as though she could sense my presence there.

But of course she did not look back. None of them did. None of them had any reason for glancing back, apart from Shinkichi. He had the self-control not to do so.

They walked away. I stood against the rail while my fellow passengers bustled and milled about me, maneuvering their luggage and furniture to the gangplank. As I stood there, I struggled against giving in to tears.

It was more than eight months from the night when I discovered the Oxygen Destroyer’s properties, to the day on which I supposedly took my own life. Through all those eight months I had hidden myself away, frantically experimenting in the quest for some positive use to which I could turn this horror. For all that time I had closed myself away from the world, terrified that if I talked with too many people, the truth about my discovery would be revealed. And in closing myself away from the world, I had also closed myself away from the two people I loved.

Between my discovery last December and the day on which we set out to kill Gojiro, I had seen Emiko and the professor maybe half-a-dozen times. Before that, we had typically spent time together at least once a week.

Now I cursed my foolishness in cutting myself off from them. Now, when it was too late, I hated that I had deprived myself of their company when I could still be part of their lives.

_Not to mention,_ I thought, _that if I hadn’t closed myself off from them as I did, perhaps Emiko wouldn’t have fallen in love with Ogata._

_No,_ I thought furiously back at myself, _no, you really shouldn’t mention that, because it isn’t true. It’s not only an unworthy thought, it’s an inaccurate one, too._

I knew there were two factors to Emiko’s decision, probably each of them as important as the other. One factor was that she wanted to marry Ogata. The other was that she did not want to marry me.

As I stood at the rail with my grief welling inside me, I realized it was not Emiko I would miss the most. It was the professor. It was the thought of never hearing his voice again that almost made me break down in tears.

Professor Yamane Kyohei had been my lifeline for these past nine years. His presence in my life had given me stability and strength. I felt suddenly afraid that I would not succeed in finding those qualities for myself, without the professor to serve as my island in a turbulent sea.

In that moment I felt almost as lost as I had felt on that day nine years ago, when we became each other’s family.

I thought back, and I saw the professor and me sitting side by side in the street beside the charred wreckage that had been my family’s house. The professor awkwardly put one arm around my shoulders—awkwardly because both of his hands were swathed in bandages, and he had to try not to bump them on anything. With equal hesitancy, striving to avoid further pain, I rested my burned, bandaged head against the professor’s shoulder and I finally began to cry.

Professor Yamane had been captain of the neighborhood fire-fighting crew of which I’d been a member. Together, he and I tried to guide our fleeing neighbors to some place of safety, when it became only too clear that the fires couldn’t be stopped. Together, as we ran, we had seen people burning all around us; babies bursting into fire on their mothers’ backs. We had seen, and heard, as running, screaming people erupted into pillars of flame.

The professor was the one who had beaten out the fire that kindled in my hair when the burning shrapnel hit me. I was the one who had pulled him into the shelter of a concrete building’s doorway, where we hid as a wave of fire billowed up the street and somehow passed us by.

That day, five days after the great fire-bombing of Tokyo, was the day when we both finally accepted that our families were gone.

We had gone together to every place we could think of. We’d tried every hospital, every makeshift clinic, every location where our suddenly homeless people were sheltering in their thousands. We had gone to the same places over and over again, asking after our family members, trying to find somebody who had seen them. A few times we found surviving neighbors who had seen one or the other of them, early on in that night. We found no one who had certainly seen them die. But we never found them.

On that day we finally admitted to ourselves that we would never see them again, or ever find any trace of them.

Professor Yamane would find no remnant of his wife, his wife’s parents, his six-year-old son. I would never find my mother or my two little sisters.

They were simply gone. Gone, like so many thousands of others.

They might be among the mounds of incinerated corpses that crews were working to clear out of the streets, bridges and burned-out buildings. They might be with the thousands who had fled to the Sumida River seeking refuge from the fires, only to boil to death in its waters. Perhaps theirs were some of the corpses that had been crowded together in the Sumida when the tide came in and bore them away, out to sea.

The only ones left of our two families were the professor and me, and twelve-year-old Emiko, who had been evacuated from Tokyo with the rest of her schoolmates to do farm work in the countryside, months before.

As I stood on the deck of the ferry boat on that August evening nine years later, I heard Professor Yamane say to me as he had said on that day, “We will be each other’s family now. You, me, and Emiko. We three will help each other. We will help each other find the strength we need to keep going. We will help each other survive.”

On the deck of the ferry, nine years later, I whispered, “Forgive me, Professor. Forgive me for leaving you.”

_Please forgive me,_ I thought. _Please forgive me, and please don’t forget me._

_Of course they won’t forget you,_ I told myself impatiently, striving to conquer my sorrow by turning it into scorn. _They won’t forget you, and they still love you. Just the same as you still love them._

_Only now they love you as one of their dead. Now their love will take the form of paying honor to your memory—instead of talking on the phone together, going to concerts and movies with you and having you over to dinner once a week._

_And your love for them,_ I thought onward, _will take the form of protecting them. Just as you reminded Shinkichi, you are protecting the professor and Emiko by staying dead. You’re protecting them, and hopefully you are also protecting all the world._

While I wrestled my memories and my grief, all of my fellow passengers had disembarked. I only noticed that I was all-but alone on the deck when the purser took a stand next to me and inquired astringently, “Will you be disembarking here?”

“Yes,” I told him, in surprise. “I’m sorry; yes, I am.”

Of the other passengers, some had left the pier on foot and others had ridden away in the fleet of taxi-cabs that had awaited the ferry. One last taxi remained, its driver eyeing me without much hope as I walked across the pier. I waved him on, and the unsurprised driver headed his cab away.

It occurred to me that Gojira’s assaults on the city should be a boon to Tokyo’s taxi-drivers—to those who had survived, and whose cabs had not been crushed or burned. The railroad infrastructure must be so badly crippled that it might be next year before trains ran through Tokyo again. I doubted that even the tram-lines would get up and running again all that swiftly. In the meantime, the cab-drivers should be doing well enough that their profits from this year would go a long way toward supporting them through their eventual retirements.

The city’s weather today must have lived up to its reputation for sweltering August heat, if it was still as hot as it was now at past 6:00 in the evening. I was glad I had spent the day on shipboard, and had spent the past almost-week in the more temperate climate of Odo Island.

I grimaced as I thought of how the hot weather must be making the clean-up efforts all the more painful for those working in the crews. The effect of the heat on the corpses that Gojira’s rampage must have left throughout vast swathes of Tokyo did not bear thinking of. Hopefully, at least most of them had been found and dealt with, by now.

As I left the pier behind, the street before me presented a bizarre vista. To my left, the buildings on that side of the street stood unscathed. On the right, areas of thoroughly demolished ruins alternated with buildings that seemed not to have suffered at all.

The answer occurred to me, _The ruined buildings are Gojira’s footprints._ Although it was not quite as simple as that, I realized, since some of the ruins must have been caused by the swinging of the great creature’s tail.

At the first patch of wreckage ahead of me, a sort of awning-like tent had sprouted at the edge of the rubble. It was fashioned from an olive-drab tarp that I thought was probably government issue, distributed as part of the supplies for disaster-relief. A hand-painted sign on a broken piece of board, mounted above the tent entrance, read “Saito’s Noodles.”

Mr. Izuma had sent me on my journey with some rice-balls that I’d eaten for lunch on the ferry, but that lunch now seemed to have been a very long time ago. My stores of cash were not great, but nonetheless I decided I could afford to try some of Saito’s noodles.

As I walked up to the tent, a family was leaving it. I recognized them as fellow passengers from the ferry: a young couple and their small daughter, all loaded down with bags and suitcases. At least they were not among the passengers who were relocating along with their furniture. A man’s voice from within the tent called out to them, “Thank you; come back again soon.”

The makeshift noodle-shop looked like a combination of restaurant, storeroom and garden shed. A shelf that had probably been part of the bar of an actual restaurant was propped atop two stacks of crates. Seating took the form of several bar stools and additional crates. A man who was presumably Saito himself crouched by a pan of soapy water, washing the bowls and chopsticks of his recent customers. These he deposited in a bucket to await future use. The rest of his establishment consisted a wheelbarrow holding boxes of noodles and other ingredients, and two camp stoves that formed the heart of the noodle-shop’s kitchen.

“Welcome!” Saito called when he saw me, straightening up and wiping his forehead with the back of a soap suds-covered hand. He was a round-faced, cheerful-seeming fellow. The thought occurred to me that he was the type of person whose optimistic outlook can make the aftermath of disaster seem that crucial little bit less desolate. I thought that his cheerful look must do wonders in promoting his noodle-selling business.

“You want a bowl of noodles?” Saito inquired.

“If you’ve got any left.”

“You’re in luck; there’s just enough left to make a helping for you and one for me. And I’ll get a new batch going, for when the out-bound ferry crowd gets here.”

The amount that Saito charged me for a bowl that held noodles, broth and a few chunks of vegetables was not even slightly exorbitant. This further recommended him to me as an entrepreneur who did not seek to make undue profit out of Tokyo’s disaster.

I perched on one of the bar stools to eat. Saito sat down with his bowl on a crate beside the camp stoves.

“Gojira?” he inquired, gesturing with his chopsticks toward my bandaged face.

I was a bit surprised that he would ask me about that, rather than attempting to act as though he didn’t notice it. But I suppose in the wake of most disasters, the disaster itself tends to be what people are eager to talk about—so eager that standard propriety can somewhat fall by the wayside.

“That’s right,” I confirmed. “On Odo Island.” Rather than allow the conversation to linger on this topic, I asked, “Wasn’t there a restaurant on this spot?”

“There certainly was,” Saito said, in a tone of what seemed to be rueful pride, “and I was the proprietor. I had eight employees. Had to let all of them go, after Gojira—well, I let five of them go,” he added, his expression turning somber. “The other three of them were killed in Gojira’s attacks.”

I nodded, and asked, “Has there been any official announcement yet of the total number who were killed?”

“They’re estimating it’s probably right around 50,000,” he told me. “That’s including the crews of the 17 ships Gojira sank.”

_Fifty thousand,_ I thought. It was a large number, of course, but I couldn’t help thinking about how very much worse it might have been. With that in mind, I observed, “At least that’s a lot less than died in the fire-bombing.”

Mr. Saito finished off his own helping of noodles and set about washing his bowl and chopsticks. “I guess it makes sense,” he remarked, “since the Americans were _trying_ to hit us. I guess Gojira wasn’t really trying. He probably didn’t care about us at all. He was just here, and so were we. There’s probably not any more sense in getting angry at him than there is in getting angry at a typhoon or an earthquake.”

I nodded again, although from the dreams I’d been having, I didn’t believe Saito’s analysis was fully accurate. If what those dream transmissions had told me was true, then Gojira had been trying to “hit” us, in a sense. Gojira had come here with the goal of teaching a lesson to the “little land animals.”

The thought also struck me that Saito was referring to Gojira as “he,” whereas I always thought and said “it.” As I thought back to my dreams, I realized they had given me no sense of the creature’s gender, if it had one. I still was none the wiser as to whether Gojira should appropriately be spoken of as he, she, or it.

I changed the subject again by asking, “I was hoping to get a job with some crew working on clean-up or construction. Think I’ll have any luck at it?”

“Oh, yes, you ought to. There’s plenty of work to do! The government’s got tent cities for workers set up in four or five places. Makes sense, since so many potential workers have lost everything.” He hurried on from that statement with an embarrassed look, probably afraid that I would think it rude, since it might refer to my own situation. “They’re providing food, too: breakfast and dinner, though I think if you’re eating their food and staying in one of their tents, your pay’s less than if you don’t take the room-and-board option. And they’ve got hiring stations set up at most of the camps, from what I’ve heard. So it sounds like that’s where you’ll want to go, probably first thing tomorrow.”

“Mr. Saito,” I told him appreciatively, as I handed my chopsticks and empty bowl back to him, “you are as good as a newspaper.”

He shrugged and gave a self-deprecating sort of smile. “Well, you know, I’m the first person a lot of folks meet when they get in to town. I like to think of myself as a kind of one-man chamber of commerce.”

“Do you know where these tent cities with hiring stations are?”

“The one by Ginza Railroad Station is the nearest to here. There’s one at the Shinbashi Station railyard, too, one by the Kachidoki Bridge—or where the bridge used to be—one near Asakusa Station, and then I think there may be another one near Ueno.”

“Then I’ll take your advice and try one of them tomorrow morning.”

“Of course,” Mr. Saito went on, as he started the process of preparing his next batch of noodles, “from what I hear, it’s a more complicated clean-up than it would have been, if that critter wasn’t radioactive. So far, a lot of the work ends up being just hurry-up-and-wait, while the Geiger-counter boys check out the radiation levels at each place. They make the call on whether a crew can get just get working, or whether people need to wear radiation suits to work there. If you were a Geiger-counter operator, you’d never be out of work again.”

Saito sighed. When he continued to speak, it seemed almost as though he was talking to himself. “That’s what my wife is really worried about: the radiation. I tell her we can’t hide from radiation anymore. It’s everywhere. Ash from the tests is falling all over the world; there’s radiation in the fish. She doesn’t want to hear that, though. She wants to think there’s something she can do to protect our kids. And, well, I don’t blame her for that.

“We’re living in what used to be our back yard shed, now; we’ve been there for five days. Gojira stepped on our house, just like he did on my restaurant. There’s probably quite a bit left in the ruins of the house that we could salvage, but Harumi won’t let me or the kids set one foot inside the wreckage. Even here,” he continued, gesturing around, “I had to give her my solemn word that I would set up next to the restaurant’s ruins, not in them. She’s afraid the radiation will get me if I’m working every day in one of Gojira’s footprints.”

He stared into his pot of broth and said, with another sigh, “Five days, and she hasn’t let the kids go out of the shed once. She’s even got them using a chamber pot, but she won’t let them go outside to empty it. She or I always have to do the emptying. The kids are going to have to go outside sometime. They’re going stir-crazy, naturally. And school ought to be starting in a couple of weeks. But she’s afraid that anywhere they go, they’ll be walking through radiation …”

Mr. Saito suddenly realized how much he was talking. “I’m sorry,” he said hastily, with a queasy-looking smile. “Don’t listen to me; I’m being an idiot. I am really not doing well in my job as a one-man chamber of commerce.”

“No,” I told him forcefully, hoping he could hear in my words how sincerely I meant them. “I don’t mind it. Truly. I am very happy to listen, if that will be any help to you at all.”

His smile turned apologetic as he told me, “I guess it’s been building up for a while. It finally just had to get out.” Taking me at my word, Saito again began talking, in a distant, almost dreaming tone.

“I’m starting to think we’ll have to leave Tokyo. I hate even to say it. Both our families have lived here forever. Our families were Edo people before it even was Tokyo. And we’re still here … through the Great Kanto Earthquake, through the fire-bombings. But now we may finally have to leave, because a giant radioactive dinosaur came to crush and burn our city.”

Shaking his head, Mr. Saito added, “I hate to think of it, but we can’t go on like this. We can’t spend the rest of our lives afraid to let the kids ever take a step outside.” I noticed that with that statement, he had stopped insisting it was only his wife who had fears about radiation and their children.

As I listened to the noodle-seller’s words, I felt a sudden, deep sense of affirmation.

_I_ am _doing the right thing,_  I thought.

_It is right for me to leave Dr. Serizawa Daisuke with the dead._ _It is right for him to stay dead, and hopefully the Oxygen Destroyer will stay dead along with him._

_There’s nothing I can do to change the fact that we live in the Atomic Age. But maybe no other scientist will learn the Oxygen Destroyer’s secrets as I did. Maybe I can stop the Oxygen Destroyer from becoming another source of fear, for all the parents who live in dread for their children. Maybe I can stop it from becoming another sword of doom to hang over us all._

Meanwhile, Mr. Saito had succeeded in pulling himself together. He asked, sounding almost matter-of-fact again, “Do you have a place to stay for tonight?”

“No,” I said. “I was hoping you could recommend a place.”

“Well, the thing is, it’s difficult finding any place to stay in Tokyo now. So many people are homeless, and so many hotels got destroyed. How about this? I’ll be sticking around here until the last ferry of the day heads out. You stay ’till then, and you can help me pack up and carry all this stuff home. I usually have to take two trips to get it all. And in return, you can stay the night with us.”

While I was gazing at him and trying to decide how to answer, Saito hurried onward, “It’s nothing great, like I was telling you; it’s just a shed. But we’ve been trying to make it feel more like home. I cut a couple of windows into the walls, so it’s not all that bad anymore. You can stay with us tonight, and then tomorrow you should be set for a place to stay, when you’ve got a job with one of the clean-up crews.”

Suddenly it occurred to me to wonder, _What is it about me that makes so many people feel like they want to adopt me?_

_Maybe it’s my missing eye. Maybe that makes the people with the strongest parenting instincts want to take care of me and try to keep me safe._

Not that I was complaining. I was grateful to the depths of my soul for Professor Yamane, for Mr. Izuma and Shinkichi, and now, for Mr. Saito the noodle-shop owner.

“I am very thankful,” I told him quietly. “But I’m afraid I might disturb your family. You see, I’ve been having nightmares …”

“Who hasn’t?” Saito asked me, smiling.

I smiled back at him, but I continued, “But I’ve been told that the nightmares make me talk in my sleep. Or, it’s not even so much that I talk. I’m told it’s more as though I’m growling. I’m afraid that would frighten your children.”

Oddly, this confession of mine seemed to make Mr. Saito more cheerful. “Growling, eh?” he said. “I guess maybe you’re dreaming that you’re Gojira.”

My smile felt frozen on my face as I answered, “I guess maybe I am.” “Well, don’t worry about it,” Saito told me. “My wife is afraid of radiation, and the kids are afraid of Gojira. You aren’t either one of those, so it should be fine. We’ll just warn everyone about your growling. That way, when they hear it they’ll know it isn’t another monster coming to get us.”

_That would be a good thing, I thought. We have all got enough monsters already._

“Well,” I began, “if you really are certain …”

“I wouldn’t make the offer if I wasn’t.”

“Then, all right. Thank you. I accept.”

“Good!” exclaimed Mr. Saito. He stood up, and I did the same, sliding down from the bar stool. Saito continued, “Then if you’re to be a guest in my home, we ought to introduce ourselves. My name is Saito Mitsuo.” He bowed slightly as he said it.

“I’m glad to meet you,” I told him.

And the thought hit me, _This is it. Right here, right now. This is where my new life begins._

I bowed in return. For the first time, I said the words, “My name is Sieji Masaji.”


End file.
